Turns out that the myth of the 8-hour sleep is a recent phenomenon—and that lying awake at night could be good for you.

***

Get ready for the Bourdain stamp of approval on a new line of foodie books.

***

Neiman Watchdog asks: Do politicians know anything at all about schools and education?

***

A perfectly preserved 300 million year old forest discovered under a coal mine in China features trees with branches and leaves intact.

***

We were totally OK with climate change until it started to affect our Shiraz.

***

How to ask political candidates questions and get answers.

***

What does a 55-gallon drum of sex lubricant say about the way we interact with Facebook?

***

Dexterous robots toil at the bottom of the sea to safeguard the web.

Mandarin, Arabic, or Spanish? Of all the world’s tongues, what is the best language to learn?

***

One woman’s brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying time inside the online-shipping machine.

Image by Alyssa L. Miller, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Remember those historical maps of European languages in the decades before World War I? They’re pretty common, especially buried in the Bargain Books section of Barnes and Noble. Anyway, the premise was that, by the middle of the 19th century, Europeans were beginning to identify more with their own nationality and language than with their imperial governments. Anachronistic states like Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire had a hard time dealing with passionate nationalist movements erupting in places like Greece and Serbia, and a lot of this had to do with language.

The maps themselves are pretty telling. The boundary between, say, Russia and Austria is a single red line, thin and elegant. But large colored sections with labels like Ukrainian and White Russian straddle the borders, and form large, amorphous blobs across much of Eastern Europe. Because people are less predictable than countries—or at least less tidy—there seems to be little rhyme or reason. Pockets of Finns and Estonians color northern Russia, Greeks go as far east as the Black Sea, and Germans are everywhere.

From this information, it’s clear in hindsight that big changes were in store for Europe.

Today, borders are a lot less important. Innovations like the Schengen Area have made a ghost of centuries of European warfare, and trade pacts around the world further delegitimize official boundaries. A lot of this change is based on communication. By the numbers, Facebook is the third largest country on earth, and Verizon is (economically) bigger than Peru.

Aside from their sheer size, it’s also clear that social media networks, like European languages, are making political boundaries even less significant. Two maps on Frank Jacobs’ Strange Maps blog come to mind. The first is a visualization of Twitter languages across Europe, which looks something like a multicolored “Europe at night” photo. As Jacobs notes, the maps illustrate not only that Twitter has expanded well beyond the English-speaking world, but also that languages are no more tied to national borders than they were in the 19^th century.

In the U.S., language is a little more homogenous. But patterns of communication are just as messy and unpredictable as in Europe. Another Strange Maps creation superimposes pockets of cell phone “communities” on U.S. states, which, surprisingly, changes their layout quite a bit. Because people in southern Illinois are more likely to call St. Louis than Chicago, Missouri has grown in size, even taking parts of eastern Kansas. Minnesota has taken western Wisconsin and connected with Iowa, and one of the Carolinas has annexed the other. 

Boundaries, even between states, still profoundly influence our lives, and it’s especially hard to deny their importance during a federal election cycle. But the way we connect with one another is not so clear cut, and that’s likely to inspire ever more complex ways of viewing the world around us.

Sources: Strange Maps, BBC, The Economist, Mongabay.com.

Image by Andrei Nacu, licensed under Creative Commons.   

Romance novels are the least stuck-up books in the world, almost never reviewed or discussed at a dinner party. One is supposed to be embarrassed to have a taste for them. And yet, The Awl reminds us, so many of us do….

***

Don’t be scared of Picasso and Pollock. New research shows that fear heightens your appreciation of abstract art.

***

Would food taste better if you kept it on the kitchen counter? The project Save Food from the Refrigerator finds alternative ways to keep food fresh.  

***

Experimental chefs in India have captured the taste of smog.

***

Artists can—and should—be ordinary, too.

***

It’s time, argues Strong Towns Blog, to start getting used to a world with no new streets.

***

A dispatch from an über-clandestine, global gathering of casino sharks and card counters.

***

“[T]he most recent Gallup surveys” writes Joel Kotkin, “[. . . show] a remarkable correlation between the states and regions with the highest proportion of childless women under 45–the best indicator of offspring-free households—and the propensity to vote Democratic.”

***

Like Sherlock Holmes, with booze: The mystery of the Canadian whiskey fungus. 

***

Are there too many think tanks with too few original thoughts? Tevi Troy thinks so.

***

Transcending partisan rancor, lefty Ralph Nader and rightwing Bruce Fein provide a blueprint for a new kind of politics.

***

Big Think exposes the myth of the tortured writer and “the kind of single-minded devotion (to anything) that seems so at odds with our disposable culture.”

Image by jjpuzzles, licensed under Creative Commons. 

According to a new poll, parents claim that traditional fairytales are too scary for modern children.

***

The importance of roughhousing with your kids, as explained by The Art of Manliness.

***

The Invasivore Movement: Four invasive species make their way to the dinner table.

***

How to fix a broken border—specifically, that really long one along the southern edge of United States.

***

Indoor, urban composting using the Parasite Farm.

***

Have a very literary Valentine’s Day!

***

Why are organic food prices so high? Glad you asked. A farmer fires back.

***

Should a woman feel sad about her abortion? Revolution takes a no apologies approach.

***

Tucson, Arizona, schools have banned books by Native American and Chicano authors and told teachers to stay away from discussions where “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes.”

***

A TED Talk on the social history of nightclubs, why girls want to sleep with the lead singer in a band, and how the stock market can influence what is hot in popular music.

***

A brief history of the pawn shop.

***

As more people work where they live and live where they work, it’s time to rethink home design.

***

If you combine a controversial street artist with an Academy Award-winning actor, what do you get? Hanksy.

***

Salon’s re-emphasis on original journalism over aggregation pays off.

Image by aqsahu, licensed under Creative Commons. 

A diamond is a girls’ best friend—because that’s what the diamond industry has decided.

***

Ten ironic ways to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Example A: “Wait in the park, and when couples pass by in horse-drawn carriages, spatter them with glue, yelling, ‘No one cares where last year’s horse went, do they?!’”

***

Illegal baby names from around the world.

***

“You are an idiot and a disgrace.” The Believer writes about the flood of outrage that is the result of saying absolutely anything on the internet.

***

Be inspired by this story of an actress who was propositioned by a famous casting director. When she refused to sleep with him, he told her “You’re never going to get anywhere in this business. You should go home and marry a Jewish dentist.” (Hint: She got somewhere.)

***

Is godlessness is the last big taboo in the US?

***

French parenting is like French cooking: It comes in smaller portions.

***

Could cyber-gardening be the new urban-gardening?

***

Factory farming is creating a new breed of hellacious superbugs.

***

On the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth, Slackbridge, Gradgrind, and Jarndyce still have something to say about contemporary society and politics.

***

Manufacturers have found a new way to appeal to eco-friendly consumers: Brown it.

Image by AMagill, licensed under Creative Commons.